A software-defined data center (SDDC) is hardware agnostic and is designed to work with hardware from various different vendors. Applications on SDDC run on, logically defined resources for which hardware is abstracted away. Hardware Management System (HMS) is used to provide the hardware abstraction. HMS is responsible for inventory, discovery, monitoring, configuration and lifecycle management of individual server or switches.
Discovery and inventory of hardware is one of the key functions of HMS and is usually quite time consuming given the amount of data to be queried and parsed using out of band or in-band path. HMS is stateless and hence ends up doing a rack discovery and inventory every time it boots up. It usually it takes more than 1 minute to inventory a single host and around 2 minutes more to inventory a single switch. Each rack may have pluralities of both servers and switches.
In a multi-rack environment the discovery time problem can grow significantly worse when HMS has to collect a multi-rack inventory.